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Ethnographic Research: Understanding your Audience
- 2. What is Ethnography? Ethnography is the in-depth study of people – values, cultures, beliefs, habits, behaviours, and languages Igbo tribe, Nigeria Investors at the New York Stock Exchange Arsenal football fans Commuters on the Tokyo subway
- 3. Why is Ethnography Important? Ethnography is a tool for building knowledge about humans, societies, and cultures • To seek the truth - “What people say, what people do, and what people say they do are entirely different things”- Margaret Mead • To understand behaviour within and between groups of people • Ethnographic research is useful for validating or reconceptualising our understandings of concepts or theories
- 4. The History of Ethnography Ethnographic research has a history rooted in colonial endeavour Early ethnographies referred to colonised people as “backward”, “primitive”, or “savage”
- 5. Immersive Research Today, the focus is on more immersive techniques – researchers study informants in their own environment using unobtrusive methods like note-taking and participant observation Franz Boas: “you can only truly understand culture when you experience it first-hand” Participant observation in winter pastures on the south side of Ob Bay, Russia
- 6. Reflexivity Reflexivity involves reflecting on the way in which research is carried out and understanding how the process of doing research shapes its outcomes The researcher, as the interpreter, contributes to the construction of meaning
- 7. How to Conduct Ethnographic Research Who are we studying? What are we studying? How Are we going to study it? Where is the research taking place? Why are we conducting the research? When are we conducting the research?
- 8. Ethical Considerations Considering the ethics of your study is vital to conducting research responsibly • Does the project involve humans or animals? • What are the implications that this has? • Are there any potentially negative impacts that your research might have? • Are you going to use consent forms? • Be aware of the implications of your research and if there are any potential issues, make sure that you raise them and that you explain how you will try to mitigate them
Editor's Notes
- Hi everyone, thanks for having me here today. My name is Mohini Baijnath and I’m an educational researcher at an organisation called Neil Butcher and Associates where we focus on providing policy advice and researching and developing educational systems. It’s always such a pleasure to be able to speak about something that excites you, and research excites me. My love of research grew out of sheer curiosity. When I was growing up, I loved to watch people. The way they spoke, gestured, their habits and interactions were fascinating. I realised quite early on that in most cases, asking something directly wasn’t nearly as effective as observing, listening, and interacting. It wasn’t until I reached university that I discovered that some people do this for a living – some people read and write and watch people for a living! Broadly, you might know that research can be divided into two categories– quantitative (numerical data) and qualitative (words, feelings, emotions, and other non-numerical and unquantifiable elements). Ethnographic research is one type of qualitative research. It is a social science that was developed in the discipline of called Social Anthropology. Anthropology is the study of human societies and cultures and their development, essentially, it is the study of what makes us human. One of the main tools that we use to study humans is ethnographic research.
- Ethnography is the in-depth study of people– it allows you to take a specific group in society and study their values, cultures, beliefs, habits, behaviours, languages.
- It’s interesting… Research is an interaction. It requires the interviewer to i) navigate multiple historical, political, economic and personal details in order to obtain meaningful data and then ii) take that data and use it responsibly, ethically and accurately. It involves collaboration between the interviewer and the subject where they co-construct information. To understand behaviour within and between groups of people. For example, the aim of an ethnographic study within a usability project is to get the details of a design problem (and its associated issues). It is hoped that by achieving this, a designer will be able to truly understand the problem and therefore design a far better solution. Many common forms of research include surveys, focus groups, and short interviews. But asking people to tell you what they think and how they behave only gives you one piece of the puzzle. Famous anthropologist Margaret Mead said: what people say, what people do, and what people say they do are entirely different things”. This is why sometimes it’s important to take the research a level deeper, and that is what ethnographic research allows you to do. Therefore, ethnographic research is useful for validating or reconceptualising our understandings of concepts or theories. It would be easy run with an idea to implement a loyalty programme for theatre-goers at the Market Theatre, but this kind of strategy could be much better understood if you understand your customer: Engaging with theatre-goers and finding out about what their needs are, their behaviours, what they value in the experience and what draws them to the theatre could provide valuable insights into how to tailor the strategy to their needs.
- It has a dark history: With the rise of colonization in the 18th and 19th centuries, Europeans came into increasing contact with other peoples around the world, prompting new interest in the study of culture and difference. Colonizing nations of Western Europe—such as Belgium, Portugal, Spain, France, and England—extended their political and economic control to ‘mysterious’ regions in the Pacific, the Americas, Asia, and Africa. Europeans suddenly had a flood of new information about foreign people encountered in the colonies. The colonizing nations of Europe also wanted scientific explanations and justifications for their global dominance– oppression is a much easier pill to swallow if you can justify it in some way. In response to this, and out of a growing interest in new and strange cultures, the first amateur anthropologists formed small communities in Western European countries in the early 19th century. These communities eventually turned into professional anthropology. Writings based on these theories described colonized people as “backward”, “primitive”, or “savage” and therefore unfit for survival unless colonists “civilized” them to live and act as Europeans did. Essentially, Europeans of the time convinced themselves that they were doing colonized people a favour by saving them from themselves. This application of evolutionary theory to control social and political approaches became known as social Darwinism. In 1922 Bronislaw Malinowski, known as the Father of Anthropology, published a trilogy of books. The first was called “Argonauts of the Western Pacific”. The book is about the Trobriand people who live on an island near Papua New Guinea. The other two were titled “The Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia” and “Coral Gardens and their Magic”. Many argue that anthropology is born out of the study of the ‘other’ to justify difference and superiority, but in the 1930s, this changed with Frans Boas. Boas emphasised the importance of anthropologists conducting original fieldwork to get first-hand experiences with the cultures they wished to write about, instead of relying on other people’s retelling of their experiences. He also spoke against racist and ethnocentric evolutionary theories that were popular at the time. Based on his own studies, including his measurement of the heads of people from different parts of the world, Boas argued that genetic differences within and between human societies could not explain cultural variation. It is immersive: Boas’ realisation that you can only truly understand culture when you experience it firsthand led to a complete change in how people conducted ethnographic research. One of the bases of ethnographic research is a methodology called participant observation: a widely-used methodology where the researcher spends long periods of time in the same environment as the group that s/he is studying. It can last days, months, and sometimes even years. A lecturer of mine at university, Fiona Ross, spent seventeen years – on and off – getting to know a community in the Cape Flats. She interviewed them, lived with them, and spent time getting to know them and their families. The result was a poignant ethnographic work called Raw Life, New Hope that deals with the overarching theme of how this community tries to create a ‘decent’ life for themselves in what can only be described as ‘indecent’ conditions of poverty in post-apartheid South Africa. She takes the reader through the intimate details of their lives, their longing to leave the Shanty town and move into a real house, how familial relations take on different permutations in this dynamic space, and approaches to illness (how the community approaches illness and HIV/AIDS). The book underscores the importance of this type of research – it’s deeply immersive nature makes it an incredible study on a part of society that would ordinarily have gone unheard and unnoticed. This, for me, is one of the clearest explanations for why we conduct research– the process of discovery is so important to our own understandings and it has potential to alleviate misunderstanding, and prejudice. It’s a lesson that I have carried with me – no data or informant is insignificant.
- Reflexivity: What effect a researcher has on their own research. As researchers, we should be aware of our own subjectivity in whatever space we occupy. Research often leads you to challenging situations where you need to be aware of your own influence. Your positionality in terms of your gender, race, age, or any aspects of your identity – whether you consider them to be a part of your identity, or whether people impose a set of assumptions on you– is extremely important to think about. I learnt this the hard way when I was doing my Master’s– it involved a study of the impact of #RhodesMustFall and their influence on the decolonisation rhetoric that had pervaded universities. As part of my research, I conducted several interviews with university lecturers and was taken aback when they turned the tables on me and started questioning my motives as the researcher. What was I trying to find out? Was I trying to show university lecturers in a bad light? Cultural relativism: the idea that a person's beliefs, values, and practices should be understood based on that person's own culture, rather than be judged against the criteria of another. This was one of the main problems with early anthropology where a Western lens was used to examine non-Western people. Most of my research happens in developing world contexts, and it’s interesting to see how donors from the developed world relate to these contexts.
- Who: Who are we studying? What makes this group special? What: What are we studying? What are their behaviours? Do they have any commonly held beliefs? How: How are we going to study them? What methods are we going to use? The goal is to collect data in such a way that the researcher imposes a minimal amount of personal bias in the data. Various methods of data collection can be employed to facilitate a relationship that allows for a more personal and in-depth portrait of the informants. -Participant observation, which involves observing your participants in their environment. To do this, you might consider sitting in the theatre or just outside and watching people’s behaviours and their interactions. I’ve always enjoyed doing this just to get a sense of people in the space. I would generally do this at the beginning of the research process because it’s amazing what insights can be gained just from observing. It’s a great way to contextualise your research in your own mind and to get a feel for your informants. - Interviews are a useful way of gaining information from people. You can have structured interviews where you ask people predetermined questions and take down their answers, or unstructured interviews, where you just have a conversation with someone and then extract your data from the interaction. You could even have a combination of both, where you go into the interview with written questions as a guide for the conversation, but also let the conversation happen more naturally than a question/answer format. I always find this useful when interviewing someone for the first time– people often feel uneasy in interviews because they feel as though they are under the spotlight. If you allow the conversation to flow, they tend to be more receptive. If you do decide to compose a set of questions, it’s important to consider how you phrase them– be aware that the way you ask question might elicit a specific answer. Try to keep questions open-ended, for example, instead of asking “Do you come to the theatre regularly because you enjoy the experience?”, you might ask “Why do you come to the theatre?”. Where: In what space are we going to study them? What is the location, why is the location significant, what objects are in the space that are notable? Why: What are we looking for? When: When are we conducting the research? Is there anything special about this period of time?
- Ethical Considerations: Does the project involve humans or animals? What are the implications that this has? Are there any potentially negative impacts that your research might have? Be honest in this section – show that you are aware of the implications of your research and if there are any potential issues, make sure that you raise them and that you explain how you will try to mitigate them.
- The best researchers that I have come across are the ones who do not see the interaction as the means to an end – they are present, open, and always aware of their impact on their environment.